Kai Wagyu

Kai Wagyu holds registration No.1843 on the Kobe association's USA listing, and it sells Kobe. Those are two separate facts and this directory requires both before it will say a seller offers Kobe, because a great many businesses satisfy one of them and present it as though it were the other.

The licence is the permanent half: permission to handle Kobe, held until withdrawn, filed through a named importer. It is permission rather than inventory, and stock is the conditional half that can change without the licence changing at all, which is why the badge here is a statement about a moment rather than a standing property of the business. Confirm before ordering for Kobe specifically, as with any registered seller.

Its Japanese range is organised by where the beef came from rather than by grade alone: Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Hokkaido and Hida alongside the Kobe line. Selling by prefecture is a meaningfully better disclosure than selling by grade, because A5 is a wide band awarded to carcasses all over Japan while a prefecture is a place with its own programme behind it.

It also states that its Japanese products come with a certificate of authenticity and a traceable cattle identification number. That number is the strongest form of proof available for beef anywhere: Japan assigns every animal an individual identifier recorded in a national database, so a certificate carrying one identifies the specific animal rather than describing a grade.

A5 appears only against the Japanese product here. The Australian and American lines are described with their own systems instead, and the shop publishes an explainer comparing the grading scales rather than letting one stand in for another.

That discipline is the most common thing sellers get wrong and one of the easiest signals to read from outside. A is a Japanese yield grade and 5 a Japanese quality score, both awarded to carcasses graded in Japan, so an A5 on Australian or American beef is a category error rather than a compliment. A shop that never lets one wander is telling you it knows what the letters mean.